OSS

So where does open source fit into this? Accidental bugs, sometimes significant, will continue to exist whether or not the source code is open. Heartbleed, ShellShock, and many other high-profile vulnerabilities in open source software tell us this is the case. Intentional misbehavior would become riskier in the open, but openness is only helpful to the degree we have some way of validating that the source code that has been provided is what's actually running. This becomes increasingly important as cars become open systems, connected to our phones and to mobile Internet services.

On balance, only 147,710 of France's approximately 66 million residents participated in the vote. They may well have been a self-selected group of free/open source enthusiasts. The results of the vote do not necessarily mean that everyone in the country cares deeply about open code.

Interested in keeping track of what's happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for news in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project, in this special Tokyo Summit edition of our weekly OpenStack news.

Teradata just held its user conference, and a number of announcements coincided with the meetup. Focused on big data analytics and marketing applications, Teradata already announced two new software offerings that purportedly empower business users to uncover and operationalize the insights hidden within Internet of Things (IoT) data. We covered them here.

It was all the way back in 2010, when we at OStatic first did a short post on an emerging open source cloud computing platform called OpenStack. "The open platform will go head-to-head with cloud platforms from VMware and Microsoft, and will likely compete with other open source cloud platfroms such as Eucalyptus Systems'," we noted at the time.

Fast-forward to today, and the 12th release of OpenStack, dubbed Liberty, is out. Lots of vendors are announcing upgrades to their OpenStack distributions based on Liberty, and the latest is Akanda, the major contributor and supporter of the recently launched OpenStack Project Astara, which announced Astara's Liberty release at OpenStack Summit Tokyo.

Earlier this week I did a keynote at All Things Open. While the topic covered the opportunity of us building effective community collaboration and speeding up the development of Open Source and innovation, I also touched on some of the challenges.

One of these challenges is sustainability. There are too many great Open Source projects out there that are dead.

My view, although some may consider it rather romantic, is that there is a good maintainer out there for the vast majority of these projects, but the project and the new maintainer just haven’t met yet. So, this got me thinking…I wonder if this theory is actually true, and if it is, how do we connect these people and projects together?

While on the flight home I started thinking of what this could look like. I then had an idea of how this could work and I have written a little code to play with it. This is almost certainly the wrong solution to this problem, but I figured it could be an interesting start to a wider discussion for how we solve the issue of dead projects.

Open saucy browser maker Mozilla is spending a million dollars to make sure that the projects, upon which the company depends on do not collapse.

One of the problems of Open Sauce software is that projects get dumped because they cannot find enough developers interested in maintaining them, or the money to keep them active. This is a problem for a big organisation like Mozilla which needs some projects to be kept going at all costs.

While virtualization is great in multiplexing resources among different applications with different operating system requirements, the overheads of virtualization are pretty high. One of the other recent patterns that is gaining tremendous momentum is container-based ecosystems, where the virtualization overheads are pretty low. As I understand, it is a great environment for Linux-based distributed applications but does not yet have as strong primitives as OpenStack for multi-tenancy aspects (especially isolation).

Chrome 47 brings splash screens to Android when launching a site from a user's home screen, cooperative multi-tasking support via a requestIdleCallback() function, support for auto-dismissing notifications, and various other updates. Chrome 47 also does away with its notification center.

Not 20 years ago, Mozilla was itself the eager young open-sourcer scrambling for income, often unsuccessfully. In those early years, the plan was to sell its Mozilla Application Suite, an open-source version of Netscape Navigator, to Netscape and Netscape's corporate parent, AOL. When that didn't work out, it instead offered up its browser wares to the public directly, becoming the mostly Google-funded household name we know today.

Tempest is the OpenStack official test suite. Its purpose is to run tests for OpenStack API validation in an OpenStack cluster, in order to know how healthy our cloud is. It is also used as a gate for validating commits into the OpenStack core projects—it will avoid breaking them while merging changes. For more information about Tempest, see the developer documentation and the source code repository.

Open source voting systems offer increased transparency by using nonproprietary software open to the public to review the source code, which counts the ballots and issues election results. Supporters say open source voting is needed to safeguard against election tampering.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.